Article View: sci.physics.relativity
Article #5379Re: SCIENCE WITHOUT NEWTON EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT
From: Pentcho Valev
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:43
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:43
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3903 bytes
For the moment John Stachel and Jean Eisenstaedt are the only Einsteinians who want to reintroduce Newton's emission theory of light, without abandoning (at least not explicitly) Einstein's idiocies: http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay-einstein-relativity.htm John Stachel: "The idea that a light beam consisted of a stream of particles had been espoused by Newton and maintained its popularity into the middle of the 19th century. It was called the "emission theory" of light, a phrase I shall use. The need to explain the phenomena of interference, diffraction and polarization of light gradually led physicists to abandon the emission theory in favor of the competing wave theory, previously its less-favored rival. Maxwell's explanation of light as a type of electromagnetic wave seemed to end the controversy with a definitive victory of the wave theory. However, if Einstein was right (as events slowly proved he was) the story must be much more complicated. Einstein was aware of the difficulties with Maxwell's theory-and of the need for what we now call a quantum theory of electromagnetic radiation-well before publishing his SRT paper. He regarded Maxwell's equations as some sort of statistical average-of what he did not know, of course-which worked very well to explain many optical phenomena, but could not be used to explain all the interactions of light and matter. A notable feature of his first light quantum paper is that it almost completely avoids mention of the ether, even in discussing Maxwell's theory. Giving up the ether concept allowed Einstein to envisage the possibility that a beam of light was "an independent structure," as he put it a few years later, "which is radiated by the light source, just as in Newton's emission theory of light."......If we model a beam of light as a stream of particles, the two principles can still be obeyed. A few years later (1909), Einstein first publicly expressed the view that an adequate future theory of light would have to be some sort of fusion of the wave and emission theories. This is an example of how the special theory of relativity functioned as a theory of principle, limiting but not fixing the choice of a constructive theory of light." Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com
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X-Google-Thread: 10f545,78d8fe8bb0940176 X-Google-Thread: 10b271,78d8fe8bb0940176 X-Google-Thread: fa4c1,78d8fe8bb0940176 X-Google-Thread: 1139f8,78d8fe8bb0940176 X-Google-Thread: f55d3,78d8fe8bb0940176 X-Google-Attributes: gid10f545,gid10b271,gidfa4c1,gid1139f8,gidf55d3,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!d21g2000prf.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Pentcho Valev <pvalev@yahoo.com> Newsgroups: sci.physics.relativity,sci.physics,fr.sci.physique,fr.sci.maths,fr.sci.philo Subject: Re: SCIENCE WITHOUT NEWTON EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:43:29 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Lines: 38 Message-ID: <f8758afd-8af7-4634-b503-aeb327526a20@d21g2000prf.googlegroups.com> References: <4edccf2f-7927-4a1c-94d0-1cde1d0390d9@m34g2000hsc.googlegroups.com> <069b184d-1d91-4a2e-9c18-91d42ff6b506@u72g2000hsf.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 85.91.141.159 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1205509409 30872 127.0.0.1 (14 Mar 2008 15:43:29 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:43:29 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: d21g2000prf.googlegroups.com; posting-host=85.91.141.159; posting-account=Lz-LbgoAAABPDavKeW-eYeobwLHD_cvQ User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30),gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe)